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Tag: Review

Just when I thought the time for book reviews had long since passed, a number of year-end, best-of, favorite-book lists came out. The best of them, as far as The Baseball Codes is concerned, was from NPR.org’s Linda Holmes, who didn’t just select TBC as her favorite sports book of the year—she picked it as her favorite book for 2010, bar none.

“It is,” she wrote, “a wildly entertaining book about baseball, threading the needle perfectly in that it talks about the game with love without collapsing into the purple ‘on a dusty diamond doth man find his true heart’ kind of stuff you find far too often in baseball writing.”

She also writes that “there are a staggering number of people quoted in this book — good guys, bad guys, coaches, players, umpires — and they all have wonderful stories. It’s not about glorifying hitting guys with fastballs for staring admiringly at their own home runs, for instance, but it is about explaining that this is a fundamental part of how professional baseball works, and if you don’t get it, you’re going to get hit a lot.”